February 17, 2012

To cap off the week, here's a guest post from Anthony J. Rapino, a talented author whose work is finally getting a spotlight shone on it. I've been checking out his short stories for a couple years now, when I come across them on the Internet or anthologies, so it's especially nice to see the guy with a brand new collection of his stories being published. To celebrate, he's in the middle of a blog tour to get the word out, and I was eager to give him one more apple crate to stand on and hock his wares. Enjoy.

Recently,
it was brought to my attention that my horror collection isn’t
really
horror. Or, more accurately, a good portion of the stories in the
collection are not horror. My response surprised even me: “I
know.” I did
know! Yet somehow it hadn’t occurred to me that marketing it as
“horror” might hurt sales. I’m still not sure it does.

Let
me explain. I write horror; this is true. But when I write, I also
blur genre lines. I’m not talking combo genres like horror/sci-fi
or mystery/western. I simply mean I don’t force the stories I
write to adhere to horror conventions. I let the story tell itself,
whatever that may mean.

What
I’m left with is a collection of stories that, if I’m being
accurate, range across multiple subgenres: speculative fiction,
absurdist, horror, magical realism, bizarro, dark humor, and so on.

One
of the problems with marketing such a collection is that with all
these different subgenres commingling, it’s incredibly hard to
choose a single blanket genre (although personally, I believe horror,
or at the very least speculative fiction, works fine). The second
problem is that Amazon doesn’t have many subgenres to choose from.
There are some, but not many. For instance, the only “horror”
subcategories available on Amazon are occult, dark fantasy,
anthologies, and ghosts.

Honestly,
that’s okay with me. Genres are important for categorization. It
makes it easier for people to find what they’re looking for. But
beyond that, I find them absolutely unnecessary. I’ve always hated
labels
when applied to people, and at its worst, genres are just as bad.

I
can’t count the number of times I wouldn’t read a book or see a
movie solely based on the genre (Romantic comedy? No thanks!) only
to finally see it and love
it. Then I’d say to myself, “Self, that movie was
in fact a romantic comedy, and yet it transcended it’s genre to the
point of brilliance.” Okay, so I never actually said that, but the
point stands.

The
same goes for novels. Plenty of people might see Welcome
to Moon Hill
in the horror category and skip it, because they hate horror (or
whatever their idea of horror may be). But then they’d miss out on
the stories in the collection that are more than horror, the ones
that are about wonder, hope, or love, merely told with speculative
elements or an undercurrent of darkness.

That’s
when genre labels are bad: When they dictate what a person reads.

Moon
Hill is a forgotten place that few purposely visit, and even less
leave. Once you arrive, the deep dark of the forest creeps into your
mind and will not relent. Strange flowers that grow from deer
carcasses, murderous lunatics, talking ravens, wriggling parasites
that induce eruptive confessions, and demons of every variety: they
all live here too.

Even
so, the residents of Moon Hill can feel, beyond the fear and
distress, that this land is special and they are lucky to live here.
Most everyone feels that way right up until the day they come a
little too close to the magic of this place. When dusk's light leaks
through their carefully locked doors and rips holes in their minds.